STEM-In-Action Follow Up: Mission WaterSmart

Another week closer to our National Judging and Educational Event means another STEM-In-Action team follow up! This week we are catching up with our Midwestern team, Mission WaterSmart, to see how their project attempting to reduce water wastage in their community is going.

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Hi again! We’re Mission WaterSmart from Illinois. We’re Shivani, Ahana, and Manasvi, three sophomores from the Illinois Math and Science Academy, in Aurora, Illinois. Currently, our team is addressing the problem of water wastage. As part of our solution we are creating a SmartFaucet device. The ultimate goal of our project will be to heat up the cold water resting in the hot water pipes, thereby avoiding water wastage that results from waiting for water to heat up, and encourage water-saving habits while being affordable, and easy to install.

Since receiving our grant in August we have entered a number of competitions in order to gain traction and publicity for our project. We have gotten in contact with many resources in our school, including mentors, and labs that can give us resources and contacts. In terms of our project, we have completely taken apart the prototype that we showcased at the NJ&EE in June of 2018. We have refashioned our design to be one that is more compatible with faucets and showers, as well as more aesthetically pleasing.

Currently, we are in the process of getting a web address for the website we want to build for our project. We have many improvements that we want to make to the prototype, which include using Arduino (a type of micro-controller) to bring all the electrical components of our project together and control them. These components include touch sensor, temperature regulator, and a feedback display that will allow our project to maintain a way to encourage water saving habits.

We are also planning to make our design unique to this project by creating our own type of heater instead of buying ones sold in shops. The future also entails reaching out to more contacts in order to market our product, and being able to produce our prototype in bulk through mass producing of some sort. The future also hopefully means that once we have a solid prototype built with the grant money from eCYBERMISSION, we will be able to sell our prototype to customers.

With all the competitions that we have entered since receiving our grant, we were successful in our endeavors when it came to the Conrad Spirit of Innovation Challenge. Recently, as of January of this year, our team was named as a Conrad Innovator for the 2018-2019 year! A link to view the other innovator names teams can be found here.

We have faced challenges in being able to use the money from the grant through our school, but we have combated these problems by discussing with our business office and expediting purchasing process through our school. Overall, we are super excited to be making progress on our project and are ready to see how far we can take it by the end of the school year!

  

Figure 1: Here we have some pictures of us working on our device design. We are fixing electronics into the box and adjusting the heater that is at the top.

(Picture Credit goes to David Hernandez, IMSA, Aurora,IL)

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Incredibly proud at the work this team is accomplishing. With environmental protection being a hot topic in society these days, any little bit you can do to conserve and not waste is imperative to our planet's well-being. It just goes to show how much we are capable of and how great of an effect reducing our carbon footprint can have.

-Mission Control